Poor Pong Players Up The Screen Without A Paddle

Long live Pong!

The news is difficult for many who grew up and belonged to the early glory-days of video gaming.

The museum captured an era in gaming, housing many video and early arcade-style machines from the Golden Age of Electronic Gaming, including Pong, Galaxian, Frogger, and Pac Man.

It's a little sad to see these well-worn Colecovisions and Atari units finally being consigned to the dust heap of history, but maybe that's for the best. Besides being old, worn, and hopelessly unstylish, parents worry that obsolete gaming technology will disadvantage their children. Families with older console games may not be providing their children with enough challenges to develop their reflexes, motor skills, and reasoning abilities.

Stan Winters disagrees. "When I was young, we didn't have fancy machines like the Playstation, the X-Box, or the GameCube. We had Pong, and we considered ourselves lucky! Not everyone had Pong. It was something special. Pong enabled me to develop quicker reflexes and hone my spatial abilities. Pong was that close friend that would play with you for hours when all your other friends abandoned you. Pong listened to your problems. Pong was always there for you."

Stan Winters' enthusiasm for the game of Pong, first commercially available in 1972, led him to open the museum in 1993. Starting with five Magnavox Odyssey systems, the collection grew to include Colecovisions, Atari 2600s and even a Vetrix. Machines were hooked up to period console televisions and visitors were allowed to play the games for the price of admission.

Stan's collection has engendered lively debate in the Classic Gaming community.

"Pong was shit!" claims Will Stumner, a regular visitor to the Classic Gaming Museum. "All it did was force people to shut off their other thought processes. It was a demonstration in Pavlovian response theory that trained the gamer to drool. Put the paddle on the ball, and get rewarded with a beep or a blip. Now, a real game was Frogger. There was a game that made you think."

"Excuse me? Pong was gameplay in its purest form," defended Stan. "The simple physics, the unblemished dynamics, the sinless gameplay. Pong was an artform, a digital orchestration, a sonnet. Every other game, with their fancy sounds, rendered graphics, obtuse storylines...it's all electronic window-dressing. And every single one of these newer games were--and still are--built on the foundations of Pong. All those NHL games from Electronic Arts? Yep, Pong."

"Bah!" dismissed Will. "Pong was a primitive product for simple brains who couldn't comprehend the complex wonder of more zealous games such as Arkanoid."

"Arkanoid?!! That heretical candy-coated excuse of a video game is nothing but a perversion of Pong!" exclaimed Stan. "In fact, any game you see now, including Ping-Pong, is just an incarnation of Pong, glitzed-up with unnecessary features meant to satiate the attention-deficited Nintendo generation!"

Stan tends to get a little emotional defending his museum and its history.

"Sweet loveable Pong. There's nothing like the sweet paddle action you got from bouncing that little white square ball across your screen. (*sniff*) I'm going to miss my museum."

The rummage sale to sell off the museum's assets will take place at the end of the month. Except for the Pong games, which will only be sold after being pried from Stan's cold, dead joystick-calloused hands.